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touring shops and would love to bring someone with you who knows the business, chances are good that you can find a trustworthy friend of a friend to help you out. The cost for this service ranges anywhere between lunch and a day rate, but having a non-biased opinion is well worth whatever the fee. No matter how well you do your research, a professional maintainer will spot things, good and bad, that you may not notice.
Let’s fast forward a little and say that you’ve found a maintenance shop that does a fantastic job and you’re completely satisfied with how they treat you. Should you use them exclusively from now on? The answer is simple: yes. And no. May- be? It depends. If you have a shop that you trust completely, there’s nothing wrong with using them for all your work if that’s what makes you comfortable. That said, there are a few advantages to using more than one shop.
The Falcon 900 that I maintain is on an inspection schedule similar to annual inspections. There are three companies that are authorized by the manufacturer to perform maintenance on the airframe and engines, and I use all three of them. I don’t have a set rotation schedule and
sometimes I’ll use the same shop two or three years in a row. I get maintenance proposals from all three, compare them, then weigh all the various factors at play to decide which shop I’m going to use that year.
The main reason I rotate shops is that if a shop misses an item – an AD, corrosion, wire bundle chafing – on one inspection, they’ll likely miss it on subsequent inspections. Not because the shop employs substandard technicians
20 • TWIN & TURBINE / August 2022